Early Modern Spanish
| Early Modern Spanish | |
|---|---|
| Native to | Spain |
| Era | 15th–17th century; continues as a liturgical language but with a modernized pronunciation |
| Latin | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | – |
| Glottolog | None |
Early Modern Spanish (also called classical Spanish or Golden Age Spanish, especially in literary contexts) is the variant of Spanish used between the end of the fifteenth century and the end of the seventeenth century, marked by a series of phonological and grammatical changes that transformed Old Spanish into Modern Spanish.
Notable changes from Old Spanish to Early Modern Spanish include: (1) a readjustment of the sibilants (including their devoicing and changes in their place of articulation), (2) the phonemic merger known as yeísmo, (3) the rise of new second-person pronouns, (4) the emergence of the "se lo" construction for the sequence of third-person indirect and direct object pronouns, and (5) new restrictions on the order of clitic pronouns.
Early Modern Spanish corresponds to the period of Spanish colonization of the Americas, and thus it forms the historical basis of all varieties of New World Spanish. Meanwhile, Judaeo-Spanish preserves some archaisms of Old Spanish that disappeared from the rest of the variants, such as the presence of voiced sibilants and the maintenance of the phonemes /ʃ/ and /ʒ/.
From the late 16th century to the mid-17th century, the voiced sibilants lost their voicing and merged with their respective voiceless counterparts—laminal /s̻/, apical /s̺/, and palatal /ʃ/—resulting in the phonemic inventory shown below:
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